ovieLink, the planned joint venture by five major Hollywood studios to rent movies over the Internet, has chosen I.B.M. to operate the service, which is set to begin by the end of the year. Films will be distributed with software meant to prevent customers from copying the films or viewing them for more than 24 hours.
Terms for the three-year contract were not disclosed. But, at least initially, the value to I.B.M. is clearly more in staking out a role as an expert in distributing digital entertainment than in making money.
The studios in the video-on-demand venture, which was announced last year, include MGM, the Paramount Pictures unit of Viacom, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Brothers. Along with the rest of Hollywood, the studios have been scrambling to create an authorized Internet distribution channel that is appealing enough to persuade movie fans to pay for entertainment they might otherwise pick up free from pirated discs or from data files swapped over the Internet.
Feature-length films are not as easy to swap on the Web as music is, because films often take more than two hours to download, even with today's broadband connections. But the industry fears losing control of its products to the next generation of unlicensed file-swapping services, as data-compression technology and transmission speeds improve.
By turning to I.B.M., which has experience playing host to some of the world's busiest Web sites, MovieLink is hoping to sell reliability along with its films. Video-on-demand services, like CinemaNow and Intertainer, have suffered numerous technology glitches and have been hampered by limited program choices, according to analysts like Gerry Kaufhold at InStat/MDR.
MovieLink and I.B.M. see a multibillion-dollar market, based on estimates that 13 million households and 10 million college dorm rooms have high-speed D.S.L. or cable modem links. The partners say their movie distribution network will be faster than current services.
But skeptics say demand will be limited as long as the studios insist on releasing films to theaters, video rental chains and pay-per-view cable TV before the Internet.
